January 04, 2013

Are religious systems fundamentally opposed to women?

I'm of the belief that all religious systems are fundamentally opposed to women.

Speaking as an outsider, I'd say that it depends how you construe 'fundamentally'. To the extent that religions have been shaped by the male-dominated societies in which they evolved, it's true that much religion embodies beliefs that are opposed to the interests of women - right down (or should that be 'up'?) to the characterization of the creator as male. Perhaps Young means no more than this. On the other hand, if one takes 'fundamentally' here to entail that no system of religious belief is conceivable that does not demote the interests of women, that this is in some way essential to religion, then I think the claim is dubious. I can't see any reason preventing existing religions from being modified - in their content, their rituals, their traditions - to become non-discriminatory as between genders; or ruling out the emergence of new, gender-neutral religious systems. Fundamental to religion is the belief in supernatural entities (possibly including a divine intelligence as origin), but nothing about the superiority of men to women.